#Beyond925

April 08, 2015

First we had the spear and then next thing we had the mobile phone. The rate at which we are becoming augmented is accelerating. Portables become wearables. And increasingly wearables will become embeddables. The Internet of Things will be the Internet of Things in People (IoTiP).

Some might call this an anthropological step change. Homo sapiens is becoming Homo extensis (augmented man). This new you will come with a comet’s tail of data. Your movements, your vital signals and your attention will create a continuous stream of valuable data. If you haven’t realised it yet, personal data is the currency of the digital economy. Your ability to garner attention (eg, rock star, Olympian, intern) will determine the extent of your ‘quantified’ wealth.

This is perhaps great news, but we might reflect on:

What happens to the digital ‘have-nots’? Nobody benefits from a socio-economic chasm.

From a corporate perspective, how do you acquire and retain augmented talent?

From a governmental perspective, in an increasingly mobile world, how do you retain augmented citizens?

We are already augmented. If you don’t believe it. Go off to work tomorrow naked, without using transportation, and see how far you get.

It is generally understood that the egg came before the chicken. The layer of that egg being chicken-like, but not one hundred per cent chicken (fast food outlets take note). I believe the issue is similar for parents of digital natives.

Our children are like us, but fundamentally they are different. In terms of parenting, we are in uncharted territory.

February 24, 2015

Choosing a career used to be very straightforward. It might have involved a cursory chat with a career advisor or a lecture from your parents. You then slid into the appropriate ‘career cannon’, lit the fuse, and ‘followed’ the career trajectory, as governed by the chosen cannon.

By using the cannon analogy, I am trying to convey that back then most careers were pre-baked with a set path. Lawyers, doctors, plumbers and farmers all followed relatively well-defined career paths, which over time, at the very least, resulted in some degree of mastery and in turn an increase in their economic circumstances.

But once you left that cannon, there was little you could do to change direction. Fortunately back then macroeconomic volatility was sufficiently low, so you were more or less guaranteed to follow the anticipated path.

Today is a different story. Global connectedness, technological disruption and economic power shifts are all conspiring to create high volatility. Today, no one in their right mind would opt for the cannon approach. There are no careers today that are guaranteed to give you thirty or forty years of employment. Plus there are many career options, which might be very attractive to you, but have yet to come into existence.

I believe that today you have to run your career, or more specifically your skills portfolio, as if you were ‘playing’ the stock market. So with this in mind here are five career investment moves I would recommend:

Buy momentum: Look out for roles that appear to be on the increase. As the digital economy itself gains momentum, roles that support this transition will be pulled along in its wake. The health industry comes to mind as does anything involving sensors, mobility or sociality.

Buy value: Look out for roles that the market appears to have undervalued. When the market wakes up to their importance your economic value will enjoy a quantum leap. But be careful, the market may have not have undervalued them. It may be that the market actually knows that their sell-by date coming up. Such a career cul-de-sac role might include enterprise sales executive. In my view, any role with a strong service element is likely to shoot up in value given that ‘service is the new sales’.

Buy quality: ‘Quality’ implies that the role has been around for a while, and so has a track record, delivers a decent economic return and has good long term prospects. Accountant comes to mind, as does hairdresser. But one cannot bet on an ideal future. Maybe globalised legislation will standardise accounting, such that it becomes fully automated? Maybe MIT will discover that visible body hair is strongly correlated to eventual death?

Buy growth: Growth careers are those where the demand-supply imbalance will become more acute over time. Cobol programmers come to mind. The challenge here is to ascertain what the likely growth duration is, and thus establish whether it fits with your intended / remaining career span.

Buy often: Each time you ‘buy’ a career, you make a commitment to invest in a set of skills. The advice here is to keep acquiring skills. By watching the career market carefully you can acquire key skills early and gain first movers advantage. Warren Buffet would also advise that you keep selling to a minimum. So each skill you acquire, even if you are not using it, somehow or other maintain it. Increasingly your value proposition will be based on your unique combination of skills and experience.

I recommend you keep all of these in mind in both your choice of career, if you are a pre-worker, and your next career step, if you are already in the market.

The digital economy is taking us away from ‘off the peg’ careers, because they lend themselves to automation. Bespoke career design is the future. Your role as portfolio manager of your skillset is to ensure it is constantly rebalanced to reflect the market.

You don’t need to be a day trader as such. But you do need to be a portfolio manager if you are to avoid ‘selling yourself short’.

February 11, 2015

Being creative was once the preserve of artists, scientists and designers. The rest of us were, to varying degrees, process cogs in the factory machine. Whether that factory has a conveyor belt, or an array of desks, job spec equals cog spec.

Our role was to address the processes, or sub processes, that technology could not address. Some people today have yet to realize that this was a stop-gap solution until the technology had caught up.

Well, the technology has caught up. Soon robots will move from science fiction blockbusters to being our emotionally intelligent coworkers, who soon after will be wishing us luck whilst attending our leaving parties.

Some of us may be lucky enough to get through our career without such an experience. Perhaps we are a truly unique cog and technology, whilst racing to overtake us, will fail to do so before we cross the career finish line. Be aware that the race is on.

We can already see that technology is destroying the need for blue collar workers with the zeal of Amazon rain forest loggers. It is also ‘blue collarizing’ white collar work. There are very few places for workers to turn.

So the question arises as to how we stay in play. Well the answer is to be able to deliver value in ways in which technology cannot (if only for now). Today, our embedded computer (aka brain) is a powerful tool in respect of value delivery. But not if we are simply going to use it to follow procedures.

Young people need to be aware that they must harness the power of their brains if they are to succeed in the modern world. It’s all too easy, yes easy, to jump on the career conveyor belt, and get pulled through the education system and into a ready-made career (think plumber, doctor or lawyer).

A by-product of the digital economy is that ‘off the shelf’ careers are becoming less of an option.

Thus not only do we need our youngsters to develop and apply their creative skills, we need them to apply these skills to their career paths.

Parents have a responsibility here, as does the education system.

We cannot blame technology. It’s a byproduct of our evolution; or maybe even an essential strand of our evolution.

It would be a shame if our indifference to this reality spawned a leisure class that comprised a whole generation of people, who through no fault of their own, find themselves not just unemployed but unemployable.

About the author Ade McCormack advises organizations on the near future, particularly in respect of the digital economy and the associated anthroeconomic implications. His latest book: ‘Beyond Nine to Five: Your career guide for the Digital Age’ is out in spring.

January 22, 2015

I was maybe one year into my career when my team leader left the company. The system had bred into me that where you sat on the company organogram was a key measure of career progress. So I decided it was time for me to step onto the first rung.

I mustered the courage to make my case. Entering the office of someone so senior they actually had an office was somewhat intimidating. My emotions were thrown into turmoil as she appeared to choke on her coffee. It soon registered that I had just witnessed a live demonstration of ‘laughing underwater’. Like a game of snakes and ladders my ascent had been thwarted.

Looking back, as we transition from the industrial to the digital era I can only presume she was prescient and considerate enough to save me from my misguided career progression. I think that is the real message behind ‘lacks management skill’.

Back in the industrial era we of course needed managers to ensure the workers worked. And worked in a manner that confirmed to the factory processes. It was a given that workers disliked working and so needed to be corralled into productivity.

The allure of entering the management class was attractive back then. You could tell people what to do. And better still you didn’t have to give an explanation. You were allocated to an office or at least your cubicle had alpha positioning. You might even be allocated a car. And in some cases you got to eat in a more civilised canteen and possibly no longer had to deal with grubby customers.

But of course the world has moved on and delayering of management is standard practice these days. But the more fundamental change is that workers are starting to enjoy work. Workers are increasingly looking beyond the economics and choosing a path that reflects their passion. In what is increasingly the social economy, such people live and die by their reputation. As such their intrinsic motivation trumps any carrot / stick management tricks.

Successful companies will be those that can act fastest on the best information. Traditional hierarchies are thus obstacles to success. Collaboration is key. The flatter the people structure the better the collaboration.

Bottom line: we no longer need managers.

Despite my earlier brush with career advancement, I managed to become a project manager whilst working at the European Space Agency. My team was largely made up of space scientists from across Europe. My team meetings were largely acts of kindness by my team members. They knew what they had to do. Their reputation and their life’s work depended on it. They regarded my meetings as a kind of career tax. They understood that coming from the commercial world I had to have a sense of control so they played along.

How scientists behaved back then is how modern workers are starting to behave. Management (though not leadership) is dying along with the industrial era.

You have two choices if future-proofing your career is important to you. Become an entrepreneur and use your vision as a leadership beacon to inspire others. Or become a specialist, an artisan, whose creative skills cannot be replicated by technology. Those in management are standing right in front of the progress bulldozer. Time to decide which way to jump.